Yoann Pisterman is a visual artist and multi-instrumentalist composer from the French Riviera who is now based in Berlin. His debut album, and the tenth album from the London/Dorset label Bytes, is Water Groove, an impressionistic sound journey into waves, frequencies and electronic resonance. Yoann employs loops and repetitive patterns, interwoven between drones and melodic elements, to create magical, transportative music with echoes of the classic Japanese ambient and New Age music of the eighties and the trippy Kosmische of 1970s Germany.
‘Minoucucu’ is something of an outlier on the album, a beguiling, otherworldly electronic soundscape that sounds like a distant cousin to the dreamlike music composed by Graeme Miller and Steve Shill for the Moomins TV series in 1982. “The starting point was a collage of noises and mechanical textures made by my synthesiser,” says Yoann. “Then I articulated it into a sonic architecture, with a touch of something soft and nostalgic.” The name Minoucucu came from a personal expression Yoann would say in French, a combination of something “cheesy and sweet… I wanted to explore the childish quality of a machine that would want to become more human.”
Karolina Szymura created the mesmerising video, which combines planetary rotations, abstract shapes and the movement of microscopic lights. It is influenced by the avant-garde abstract animator Oskar Fischinger, who created the special effects for Fritz Lang’s 1929 Woman in the Moon, one of the first sci-fi rocket movies.
Water Groove will be released on Bytes on 25th of June.
